A Neural Network Model for Explaining the Asymmetries between Linguistic Production and Linguistic Comprehension

Several kinds of empirical evidence point to the existence of an asymmetry between linguistic production and linguistic comprehension: in general, understanding words seems to be easier than producing them. In this contribution we propose a neural model of the relationships between the semantic and the lexical systems. Our model explains the asymmetry between language comprehension and production as an effect of the difference between the dimensions of the brain areas which process semantic and lexical information. In fact, the model’s performance in lexical recall is worse than the performance in semantic recall due to the fact that the semantic network is constituted of more computational units (neurons) then the lexical network.